MyMedR

Displaying all 8 publications

Abstract:

Sort:

Fulltext Fake news stance detection using selective features and FakeNET

Aljrees T, Cheng X, Ahmed MM, Umer M, Majeed R, Alnowaiser K, et al.

PLoS One, 2023;18(7):e0287298.
PMID: 37523404 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287298

The proliferation of fake news has severe effects on society and individuals on multiple fronts. With fast-paced online content generation, has come the challenging problem of fake news content. Consequently, automated systems to make a timely judgment of fake news have become the need of the hour. The performance of such systems heavily relies on feature engineering and requires an appropriate feature set to increase performance and robustness. In this context, this study employs two methods for reducing the number of feature dimensions including Chi-square and principal component analysis (PCA). These methods are employed with a hybrid neural network architecture of convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) model called FakeNET. The use of PCA and Chi-square aims at utilizing appropriate feature vectors for better performance and lower computational complexity. A multi-class dataset is used comprising 'agree', 'disagree', 'discuss', and 'unrelated' classes obtained from the Fake News Challenges (FNC) website. Further contextual features for identifying bogus news are obtained through PCA and Chi-Square, which are given nonlinear characteristics. The purpose of this study is to locate the article's perspective concerning the headline. The proposed approach yields gains of 0.04 in accuracy and 0.20 in the F1 score, respectively. As per the experimental results, PCA achieves a higher accuracy of 0.978 than both Chi-square and state-of-the-art approaches.
Epidemiological variations and trends in glaucoma burden in the Belt and Road countries

Chen X, Zhao Y, Zhang A, Zhou Y, Li M, Cheng X, et al.

BMC Ophthalmol, 2024 Apr 25;24(1):195.
PMID: 38664615 DOI: 10.1186/s12886-024-03464-z

BACKGROUND: Analyzing the glaucoma burden in "Belt and Road" (B&R) countries based on age, gender, and risk factors from 1990 to 2019 in order to provide evidence for future prevention strategies.
METHODS: We applied global burden of disease(GBD) 2019 to compare glaucoma prevalence and Years lived with disabilities (YLDs) from 1990 to 2019 in the B&R countries. Trends of disease burden between 1990 and 2019 were evaluated using the average annual percent change and the 95% uncertainty interval (UI) were reported.
RESULTS: From 1990 to 2019, most B&R countries showed a downward trend in age-standardized prevalence and YLDs (all P 85 years), Malaysia(75-84 years), Brunei Darussalam(45-49 years), Afghanistan(70-79 years). Finally, in all Central Asian countries, the age-standardized YLDs due to glaucoma caused by fasting hyperglycemia demonstrated have an increase between 1990 and 2019 (all P
Availability and affordability of essential medicines for diabetes across high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries: a prospective epidemiological study

Chow CK, Ramasundarahettige C, Hu W, AlHabib KF, Avezum A, Cheng X, et al.

Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol, 2018 10;6(10):798-808.
PMID: 30170949 DOI: 10.1016/S2213-8587(18)30233-X

BACKGROUND: Data are scarce on the availability and affordability of essential medicines for diabetes. Our aim was to examine the availability and affordability of metformin, sulfonylureas, and insulin across multiple regions of the world and explore the effect of these on medicine use.
METHODS: In the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study, participants aged 35-70 years (n=156 625) were recruited from 110 803 households, in 604 communities and 22 countries; availability (presence of any dose of medication in the pharmacy on the day of audit) and medicine cost data were collected from pharmacies with the Environmental Profile of a Community's Health audit tool. Our primary analysis was to describe the availability and affordability of metformin and insulin and also commonly used and prescribed combinations of two medicines for diabetes management (two oral drugs, metformin plus a sulphonylurea [either glibenclamide (also known as glyburide) or gliclazide] and one oral drug plus insulin [metformin plus insulin]). Medicines were defined as affordable if the cost of medicines was less than 20% of capacity-to-pay (the household income minus food expenditure). Our analyses included data collected in pharmacies and data from representative samples of households. Data on availability were ascertained during the pharmacy audit, as were data on cost of medications. These cost data were used to estimate the cost of a month's supply of essential medicines for diabetes. We estimated affordability of medicines using income data from household surveys.
FINDINGS: Metformin was available in 113 (100%) of 113 pharmacies from high-income countries, 112 (88·2%) of 127 pharmacies in upper-middle-income countries, 179 (86·1%) of 208 pharmacies in lower-middle-income countries, 44 (64·7%) of 68 pharmacies in low-income countries (excluding India), and 88 (100%) of 88 pharmacies in India. Insulin was available in 106 (93·8%) pharmacies in high-income countries, 51 (40·2%) pharmacies in upper-middle-income countries, 61 (29·3%) pharmacies in lower-middle-income countries, seven (10·3%) pharmacies in lower-income countries, and 67 (76·1%) of 88 pharmacies in India. We estimated 0·7% of households in high-income countries and 26·9% of households in low-income countries could not afford metformin and 2·8% of households in high-income countries and 63·0% of households in low-income countries could not afford insulin. Among the 13 569 (8·6% of PURE participants) that reported a diagnosis of diabetes, 1222 (74·0%) participants reported diabetes medicine use in high-income countries compared with 143 (29·6%) participants in low-income countries. In multilevel models, availability and affordability were significantly associated with use of diabetes medicines.
INTERPRETATION: Availability and affordability of essential diabetes medicines are poor in low-income and middle-income countries. Awareness of these global differences might importantly drive change in access for patients with diabetes.
FUNDING: Full funding sources listed at the end of the paper (see Acknowledgments).
Precessing jet nozzle connecting to a spinning black hole in M87

Cui Y, Hada K, Kawashima T, Kino M, Lin W, Mizuno Y, et al.

Nature, 2023 Sep;621(7980):711-715.
PMID: 37758892 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06479-6

The nearby radio galaxy M87 offers a unique opportunity to explore the connections between the central supermassive black hole and relativistic jets. Previous studies of the inner region of M87 revealed a wide opening angle for the jet originating near the black hole1-4. The Event Horizon Telescope resolved the central radio source and found an asymmetric ring structure consistent with expectations from general relativity5. With a baseline of 17 years of observations, there was a shift in the jet's transverse position, possibly arising from an 8- to 10-year quasi-periodicity3. However, the origin of this sideways shift remains unclear. Here we report an analysis of radio observations over 22 years that suggests a period of about 11 years for the variation in the position angle of the jet. We infer that we are seeing a spinning black hole that induces the Lense-Thirring precession of a misaligned accretion disk. Similar jet precession may commonly occur in other active galactic nuclei but has been challenging to detect owing to the small magnitude and long period of the variation.
Fulltext Single-cell profile reveals the landscape of cardiac immunity and identifies a cardio-protective Ym-1hi neutrophil in myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury

Dong Y, Kang Z, Zhang Z, Zhang Y, Zhou H, Liu Y, et al.

Sci Bull (Beijing), 2024 Apr 15;69(7):949-967.
PMID: 38395651 DOI: 10.1016/j.scib.2024.02.003

Myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury (MIRI) is a major hindrance to the success of cardiac reperfusion therapy. Although increased neutrophil infiltration is a hallmark of MIRI, the subtypes and alterations of neutrophils in this process remain unclear. Here, we performed single-cell sequencing of cardiac CD45+ cells isolated from the murine myocardium subjected to MIRI at six-time points. We identified diverse types of infiltrating immune cells and their dynamic changes during MIRI. Cardiac neutrophils showed the most immediate response and largest changes and featured with functionally heterogeneous subpopulations, including Ccl3hi Neu and Ym-1hi Neu, which were increased at 6 h and 1 d after reperfusion, respectively. Ym-1hi Neu selectively expressed genes with protective effects and was, therefore, identified as a novel specific type of cardiac cell in the injured heart. Further analysis indicated that neutrophils and their subtypes orchestrated subsequent immune responses in the cardiac tissues, especially instructing the response of macrophages. The abundance of Ym-1hi Neu was closely correlated with the therapeutic efficacy of MIRI when neutrophils were specifically targeted by anti-Lymphocyte antigen 6 complex locus G6D (Ly6G) or anti-Intercellular cell adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) neutralizing antibodies. In addition, a neutrophil subtype with the same phenotype as Ym-1hi Neu was detected in clinical samples and correlated with prognosis. Ym-1 inhibition exacerbated myocardial injury, whereas Ym-1 supplementation significantly ameliorated injury in MIRI mice, which was attributed to the tilt of Ym-1 on the polarization of macrophages toward the repair phenotype in myocardial tissue. Overall, our findings reveal the anti-inflammatory phenotype of Ym-1hi Neu and highlight its critical role in myocardial protection during the early stages of MIRI.
Fulltext Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)1

Klionsky DJ, Abdel-Aziz AK, Abdelfatah S, Abdellatif M, Abdoli A, Abel S, et al.

Autophagy, 2021 Jan;17(1):1-382.
PMID: 33634751 DOI: 10.1080/15548627.2020.1797280

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field.
Fulltext Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning

Pavlović T, Azevedo F, De K, Riaño-Moreno JC, Maglić M, Gkinopoulos T, et al.

PNAS Nexus, 2022 Jul;1(3):pgac093.
PMID: 35990802 DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac093

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution-individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic.
Inguinal Hernia: Mesh Fixation

Sun P, Hu SB, Cheng X, Li M, Guo B, Song ZF, et al.

Hernia, 2015 Apr;19 Suppl 1:S157-65.
PMID: 26518794 DOI: 10.1007/BF03355344